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Articles: Literature | A Man of No Consequence
- Dr. Rajeshwar Mittapalli
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She does not even hesitate to confer sexual favours on other men in the hope of furthering her business interests. In A Man of No Consequence too, like almost every other woman character, Subbaiah’s wife Savitri is of extremely malevolent disposition. She is given to habitually belittling him by dealing countless subtle insults for not being what she expected him to be. Subbaiah has learnt to accept without protest her constant and contemptuous dismissal of him as a man utterly unworthy of her love, and to automatically treat himself as inferior to her. Thus his powerlessness at home, traceable to cultural roots, too seems to contribute in no small measure to his inferiority complex.
Because of a disagreement over sharing bribe money between two senior clerks in the office, Subbaiah is transferred from the Despatch Section to the all-important Bills Section. Passing bills filed by the contractors is now the responsibility of Subbaiah. Any other clerk managing this section stands the possibility of making huge sums of money by accepting bribes from the contractors. But, being scared of the law, and indeed almost everything under the sun, Subbaiah cannot even visualize the possibility.
Savitri and her brother Venkat Rao are confirmed in their opinion that Subbaiah is ‘irredeemable’ and between the two of them they trivialize him to such an extent that, except as the wage-earner, his existence has no meaning. But when Venkat Rao comes to know that his brother-in-law is now the clerk-in-charge of the Bills Section, he persuades Subbaiah, pleading an urgent need for money, to accept a bribe of five hundred rupees from a contractor called Gavaraiah (incidentally, five hundred rupees was considered a big amount during those days).
The moment he has accepted the bribe money from Gavaraiah and handed it over to Venkat Rao, Subbaiah loses the peace of his mind and begins to feel depressed and disoriented. He is apprehensive, against all logic, that he might be exposed, arrested and thrown into jail!
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